Your amazing body

Blood An adult man's body contains about

litres of blood. A woman's contains 5 about 43 litres. The blood travels along 100,000km of blood vessels which is equal to going 2.5 times round the equator. It contains red cells. The life span of red cells is only about 120 days and 1200000 to 20000000 of them are made every second. In a human lifetime you will make 0.5 tonne of red cells. Red cells are made and destroyed at a rate of 2-3 million per second

Brain power

You lose 100.000 brain cells every day! Luckily you have 100 billion altogether. If the surface area of your brain could be ironed out it would measure 2,090sq cm

Breathing

The average person inhales 6 litres of air per minute, or 8,640 litres a day. You take 13-17 breaths a minute when sitting still and up to 80 during vigorous exercise. If you average 20 breaths a minute, you breathe 28,800 times a day,

Cells

here are 50 trillion cells in your body and 3 billion of them die every minute (4,320,000,000,000 a day). Most of these are replaced. You make 10 billion new white blood cells each day. You have a total of 1,000,000,000,000 white cells, which help fight germs and infections.

Chemicals

There is enough carbon in your body to fill 900 pencils, enough fat to make 75 candles, enough phosphorus to make 220 match heads and enough iron to make a 7.5cm nail

Digestive system

Your stomach produces up to 2 litres of hydrochloric acid a day. Stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve metals, but it does not have time to damage the stomach walls because 500,000 cells in your stomach lining are replaced every minute. The small intestine is about 5m long and is the longest part of your digestive system. The large intestine is a thicker tube, but is only about 1.5m long.

Eyes

You blink about 20,000 times a day.

Gas

On average you will release 2 litres of gases from your intestines today as burps or farts

Hair Hair grows about 0.5mm a day

Heartbeats

Your heart pumps 13,640 litres of blood around your body in a day enough to fill nearly 40,000 drink cans. An average heartbeat pumps 59cc of blood. An average heartbeat rate of 70 beats a minute adds up to more than 100,000 beats a day

Mouth You will produce 37.800 litres of saliva in your lifetime

Nails

Your fingernails grow 0.05cm a week, which is four times faster than your toenails

Nerves

There are about 13,000,000,000,000 nerve cells in your body, transmitting messages at speeds of 290 km/h= as fast as the world's speediest road cars:

Nose

Your sneezes can travel at 160km/h - as fast as a train.

Skin

Your skin weighs up to 4kg and covers an area of up to 1.3-1.7sqm.

Getting dressed and undressed rubbing body parts together, and even breathing cause microscopic flakes of skin to fall off at the rate of 50,000 flakes a minute. In a lifetime you will shed a total of 18kg of skin. Up to 80 per cent of household dust is made of dead human skin cells.

Sleep

In 7.5 hours of sleep, you will sleep lightly for 60 per cent of the time and deeply for 18 per cent. You will dream for 20 per cent of the time.

Sweat

You lose about 0.5 litres of water a day through 3000000 sweat glands. In hot climates you may lose as much as 13.5 litres a day.

Urine

You will pass between 400 and 2,000 millilitres of urine every day. depending on how old you are, your body size and the outside conditions, especially temperature.